Killers of the Flower Moon
This was a book that I originally started reading earlier in the year and bounced off pretty hard. I’m generally not a huge fan of the 1900s to the early 1920s, and since all of the events happened during that time, I just couldn’t get into the book. I took a chance on the movie though, since being on a plane there wasn’t much else to do.
Similarly, you see how Lily Gladstone’s character is seduced, and becomes dependent on DiCaprio’s character, and how even when she is most fearful of him, he is still her greatest threat, slowly poisoning her insulin so that he might become sole inheritor of her wealth.
This is a story of white man hurts, and white man helps, in that the Bureau of Investigation finally unearths the plot, but at a juncture that is far too late. Too many people have died, too many families have been broken, and too much money is at stake for the Osage Nation to ever be too safe.
Its a sad story, but one told so masterfully that you are hooked by the telling of it, not necessarily by the fate that you already know of. Its very similar to that of the story told by The Titanic. Yes, you know the ship sank, but the stories that are to be told of it, is what makes it worth watching.
Highly recommended. And was completely rivited. The sheer robbery and murders of that time rivals that of the Oklahoma Tulsa Massacare, albeit for different reasons. A brief summary of the plot, in the early 1900s, The Osage Nation discovered oil on their land, and thus families of the Osage Nation were prosperous. By the 1920s, members of the rich Osage Nation started to slowly die, either by gunshot, poison, or other nerfarious means. No investigation was ever done other than the most cursory, and those frequently turns up as suicide, depression or some other absurd reason.
The Osage Nation finally gets enough power and money to beseech the US Govt for help, and in return they send some agents of a new Bureau of Investigation (that evantually turns into the FBI) that finally uncovers the plot and arrests the perpetuator of deaths within at least one family.
The movie mostly follows closely to the plot. There is no mystery as the director tells you who the murdererer is within 20 minutes of the film, and the rest is just a character study of how a person might gain confidence into the Osage family, marrying their way into it, slowly poisoning and killing the people within it, and then almost getting away with it.
The bulk of the movie revolves around Leo DiCaprio’s character who plays the man who seduces the Osage nation woman, and his uncle played by Robert DeNiro, who’s both charismatic and utterly evil at his roots. Amidst all this is the plight of the Osage Nation, how powerless they are, because they are dependent on white men to do everything. They depened on De Niro’s character because he’s the one who brougt schools, roads, and western ways of living into their nation, they’re dependent on the sherriffs and judges that rule their nation, and they are also dependent on the govt to help them when they’re at their darkest hour.